go to sleep. study. mathinate.

I’ve been contemplating starting this up again.  The biggest concern is having the time.  Or, making it.

I think EDUC 330 was my most practical class of the semester.  It’s not that I didn’t learn anything else about education in any other classes, but the knowledge that I’ve gained through this one can certainly be more actively evidenced.

My favorite tool that I started using because of the class is delicious.  I’m a big fan of organization and I like that I have so many resources compiled in one place.  The internet really has so much information available, for not only my use but also for sharing with my students.

As I become more involved with students, in observations and student-teaching, and eventually in my own classroom, I think I’ll have more to say in this edublog.  I can see the value in having a separate journal of my experiences with and opinions of education; in my personal journal, I’m afraid that my musings would just be lost.  Again, that desire for organization.

Another new resource is wikispaces, which I can appreciate for its ease and its being free.  I think it’s a good way to present my portfolio.  I can also see how I could use it in class to present new concepts or assignments in math.  It’s easy enough to use that I could even have my students use it for a project.

All in all, I think I’ve been exposed to a lot of great new information and resources for my career as an educators.   I’m looking forward to implementing them as much as I can.

As I was browsing the news headlines this evening, I came across a bit about how new NCLB proposals are pushing for states to count graduation rates by a set standard.  (See the article.)  I’m actually surprised that we don’t already have such standards and I realize that I’ve never thought about diversity among graduation rate calculation.  The newly suggested rules: “It will show how many students earn a regular high school diploma within four years – taking into account that some transfer schools. It will not include those who leave to take General Educational Development (GED) tests. In some limited exceptions, schools could count students who take longer to graduate – if they are in a program, for instance, where they earn both a high school diploma and college credits.”

Also, “graduation figures will be broken down by racial, socioeconomic, and other categories, so that graduation-rate gaps will be more apparent to the public.”   Of course, this will be an excellent way to raise awareness, if it’s done well.  I’m afraid that too many people will read the news headline and shake their head in mock frustration and then forget about it.  Or maybe it’ll be a bit of trivia that they can tell their friends when there’s not much else to say.  The initiatives should be more about programs that will keep students in school.  There should be more reform brainstorming and awareness about that.

I did a Yahoo search (I don’t usually use Google, which I think puts me in a small percentage of the population. I don’t have a gmail account either but maybe that is the topic of another blog…) on “educational math games.”

The first website that is listed is mathplayground.org, so I checked it out. It’s not a great website aesthetically – I doubt a graphic designer was involved, but it’s easy enough to navigate. Immediately, I tried out the Percent Shopping game. The premise of level 1 is that the player is a customer at a store and must calculate the savings of a 10%/35%/60%! off sale. While I had expected to be presented with one item at a time, the game is actually more interactive. The first step was to choose five items off the shelves, which was pretty cool. I chose things that I would actually consider buying (a soccer ball, checkerboard, a radio, a bike, and a drum) in real life. I bet most students would do the same thing. Once the items were selected, the game requested the total amount of the items before the sale, the amount of the discount, and the total amount including the applied discount. The prices of the items seem to be given arbitrarily and are not necessarily realistic, which is somewhat unfortunate, but the concept is more important. If a student gets stuck, there’s a “Learn How” button which explains the process for finding the answers. Also on the Math Playground website is a game that emulates the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? game show on TV called Math Millionaire. It even has four lifelines. Of course, the website won’t actually award $1,000,000 to game winners, but it’s still a fun game.

Overall, there aren’t a lot of options on the Math Playground website, but the games that are there are put together well and I think would be pretty effective for students (“Concepts include basic math operations, algebra, percent, geometry, and money.”).

The second website that showed up in my search was the FunBrain site.  However, this site requires registration, which I didn’t feel like dealing with.  However, the site is colorful and looks fun; it certainly has a more cohesive design than the previous website.  Also, the games can be searched by grade or concept.

Using Google, I came across Cool Math 4 Kids.  I found the site to be hard on my eyes (bright colors over a black background), but otherwise it looked to be well laid-out (I decided later that it wasn’t so much).  This site has been bookmarked by over 1000 Delicious users.  Still, it’s not that incredible.  I couldn’t understand how the Mouse Trap game was pertinent to math.  Math Man, a knock-off of Ms. PacMan, can be challenging (solving an equation while trying to simultaneously dodge the monsters), I don’t think it’s stimulating enough to be that useful.  I tried several of the other games, but I didn’t find any to be spectacular.  As a teacher, I might recommend this site for students to investigate outside of school but I wouldn’t take them to the computer lab to use up class time with it.

Professional Development Adds Up: Integrating Integers Across Disciplines (link)

The first quote that caught my attention was: “We’ve come to the realization that everybody can learn mathematics,” says workshop leader and school math coach Mike Gould. “It’s not a question of capacity anymore; it’s a question of how you deliver it and how you allow people to think about it…”  This is an important statement that needs to be adopted by all educational institutions, mentors, and instructors everywhere.  There have been years and years of statements regarding women’s abilities in science and math, suggestions that the female mind cannot grasp the concepts as well as men (as an example of what his statement brought to mind).  Certainly it is true that not everyone understands material in the same way, but definitive lines cannot be drawn by gender, race, etc.

This article shows how it is incredibly useful to make math visual and applicable.  Instead of focusing on the dry rules,  “we tear these problems apart, into pieces. The kids really understand and have a number sense of why the problem works the way it does.”  And math is about so much more than numbers – “It really allows kids to learn how to reason and problem solve and learn how to effectively communicate. And if they can think conceptually, it opens up not just math; it makes connections for them in the real world. It allows them to explore music and art. It’s all about rhythm and pattern. And if you can get kids to make that association, they have a new way of thinking about what it is they’re thinking about.”

At this Fullerton IV Elementary School, math has been immersed into the school; it is everywhere.  Math scores have improved as a result, which is fantastic.  When math becomes more than just numbers on the board or on a piece of paper, when it is tangible, there are positive results with the students.  Their grades go up; they like math a lot more.  And as a math person, it is really exciting to find places where hate of math is not so strong.

Elsewhere on the Edutopia website are several articles on project-based learning.  I think math programs would really benefit from projects, especially ones which show the concepts in a practical way.  In high school, I had to use calculus in maximize the volume of a box – which I created out of paper – and that was pretty neat.  As mentioned in the article, a group of students went outside to visualize all 882.5 feet of the Titanic.  Large numbers are hard to materialize mentally – ‘it’s big, but what does that mean?’  The Titanic is reputed to be the largest passenger steamship of its time, but we hardly have context for it now.  Even if it was explained as being 2.94 (so, about 3) football fields in length, that gives enough of a context to visualize the length.  Of course, the class in the article actually walked the length of the ship and felt the distance more acutely.  It is activities like this that will be most useful for teaching, especially for subjects that are considered boring or detestable.  It is in those classes in which the students need a stronger pull.

Last week, I came across a list of mathematical WebQuests for middle-schoolers, available here.  As I mentioned in my last post, I really enjoy fractions, so I wanted to look at the ”Want to Party?  A WebQuest on Decimals and Fractions,” but the link doesn’t work.  My next choice features my favorite geometric shape, the triangle.

This WebQuest lists ten tasks (six are classified as optional) which examine the different kinds, parts, and uses of triangles.  The activities include using Kid Pix software, looking for patterns, and examining angles.  I think this is a good WebQuest because it incorporates different ways of learning and utilizing knowledge on triangles.  However, it might take a while for each student to complete all ten tasks, so the WebQuest should probably be done over a period of several days.  The website recommends working in groups of three.

Few resource links are provided.  The main ideas of triangles can be supported with a glossary of geometry terms and the important conjectures (e.g., there are 180 degrees in a triangle).  Other items needed: digital camera, paper, writing utensils, a scanner, and possibly a ruler and protractor.  The final activity is to “make a HyperStudio Stack to share with the class.”

In order to do everything, the students have to be able to use all of the equipment (camera, computer, software, scanner, etc.).  The students may need support for any of those things, depending on the class’ prior experiences with each.  A teacher would have to carefully plan the time for this WebQuest, especially if expecting the completion of all ten tasks.  It might be best to pick and choose the ones that would be most useful for a particular set of students.  So, it would be very important to keep the students on task and guide them through any particularly difficult problems.

I used the Ohio Treasure Chest to find an information resource for grade 6 math.  I was drawn to the eighth objective under Numbers, Number Sense and Operation: “Represent multiplication and division situations involving fractions and decimals with models and visual representations; e.g., show with pattern blocks what it means to take 2 2/3 ÷ 1/6.”  I love fractions.  There was one link – http://www.visualfractions.com/.

While it does not have the most stunning layout, it is not cluttered and it is easy to read.  The first thing I read was Fractions are best understood when seen in bright red.  This sums up the need and purpose for the website.  Underneath is a graphic: a pie graph representing the fraction 2/3.  The categories are all visible on the lefthand side of the webpage.  It’s divided really well, starting with basics (“Identifying Fractions”) and continuing through their addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.  It also provides a section each for comparing and renaming fractions.  All of these pages provide the user an ability to submit fractions to any of the aforementioned actions, either with line segments or circles.  The idea, of course, is that it is all visual.

 The user actually gets to use the webpage to understand the material.  It is the user who enters the numbers associated with each line or circle.  The website has capabilities to explain the material (it has an Investigate category which explains fractions as a classroom lesson would) and it also has a report feature which can be printed with a students name and turned in with the score of correct answers after working through some problems.  The organization of each page is very intuitive with clear labels.

As the website is copyrighted 2008, I’d say that it is current.  The information on fractions is accurate based on my use of the website.  And as the concept of fractions is pretty concrete, I’d say it’s in no danger of losing its credibility.  Overall, I’m really quite thrilled with Visual Fractions.  It’s a great resource and it’s fun to boot.

In search of an learning activity using the internet, I found a Create a Graph application from the National Center for Educational Statistics.  It’s a site clearly marked for kids with nice colorful graphics and an intuitive layout.  Right on the main page, the user chooses the type of graph he or she wishes to create.  It also offers a tutorial and examples.  After choosing a graph, the website guides the user step-by-step to the final product: design, data, labels, preview, print/save.  Compared to Visual Fractions, this site is probably more kid-friendly; an 11-year-old could definitely get a hold on this activity without much trouble, whereas Visual Fractions might be more overwelming, based on the layout of the pages alone.  The graphing tutorial is also finely made.  This site is a great guide to creating fractions.  I think it’d be great to use before having the students create graphs from scratch because of the visual handiness of this application.

Jackie Gerstein (professor at Santa Fe Community College) has a blog on education reform and states that its purpose is “to post issues, ideas, resources related to why and how so many children – especially marginized populations – are being left behind.”  He highlights issues such as high school dropout rates, the importance of reading, and No Child Left Behind.

Going into the teaching profession, we need to know what issues are going to present themselves and those that are already present.  Not only do we need to know what to teach and how to convey that content material, but we need to do it better every year and every day.  And perhaps even more importantly, we have to figure out how to keep kids in school until graduation.  We have to give them our best, despite the poor funding of No Child Left Behind and the education budget in general.

In his 11/03/2007 blogon the NCLB agenda, Gerstein remarks that actions speak louder than words: “President rejects 5 percent increase in education funding, while approving 9 percent increase in defense spending.”  How can teachers explain to their students that education is so important (and, by relation, that reading, math, graduation are necessary) when education seems so insignificant to the national government?  Also, from this rejection of funding, how can we as a nation be competitive in the technology market?  Without proper funds, school systems cannot get new or more technology for their classrooms.  As a student, I knew that my county schools struggled to get enough money to keep up with newer editions of textbooks.  There is a similar problem with technology now (and probably still with textbooks – those costs are outrageous).

This videoon YouTube, featured in Gerstein’s 11/11/2007 blog, shows that technology literacy is and will continue to be in schools and beyond.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/ljbI-363A2Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

That video has been viewed over 3,000,000 times.  If we could somehow harness those viewers to make a change in our policies, it would be incredible.  Or, going back to the video itself, if only we could educate the millions of people that use MySpace (or Facebook) on the troubles and current and potential abilities of the education infrastructure.  We need to demand education reform.  We need to demand that No Child Left Behind lives up to its purpose: “to ensure that all children have a fair, equal, and significant opportunity to obtain a high-quality education and reach, at a minimum, proficiency on challenging State academic achievement standards and state academic assessments” [emphasis mine].

As my favorite band has said many times – albeit, on a completely different issue – Awareness is good.  Action is better.

Technology and I get along pretty well.  I wouldn’t go so far to say that I’m a tech geek, but I’m certainly not afraid of any of the technology that presents itself to me on a typical day.  If something goes wrong, I like to try to fix it myself before going to a professional.  When I was younger, in the days before mp3 players, I used to take my CD player apart when it wasn’t functioning properly to see if I could get it to work again.  I never really had any real idea what I was doing, but the CD player usually worked again.  I like the challenge of figuring out how things work.

 In high school, I had a lot of exposure to different technologies in the classroom.  On most days, at least one class would utilize video-conferencing techology to interact with other schools in the area.  In this “broadcast room,” we also had an ELMO projector and a SmartBoard (the latter of which never wanted to work correctly for any of the teachers).  We were given many opportunities to use these and other technologies (probably every program of Microsoft Office and school email addresses included).  As a result, I think I’ve been given a good foundation of how to use computer technology.

Honestly, the title of this blog would be more fitting if I were to writing about math.  It would also be rather exciting if I were a person that could easily come up with proofs for the most ridiculous theorems, and then post them here.  But I am not one of those kinds of people.  Instead, I am here to blog about becoming a teacher – specifically, a middle school math teacher.

The title is technically a quote of my friend, Herman, who gave the advice at some point during 2007.  I often use it as an away message when I’m laboring over math homework:  “Go to sleep.  Study.  Mathinate.”  It’s very purposeful and I like that.  Even though mathinate is not truly a word, I propose that it means the teaching or learning of math.  Basically, working on it or with it.  Thus, it is applicable to my current state as a student who wishes to teach.  I’m pretty excited.